Formal notification of outcomes will be provided through an RAO alert later today.

Acknowledging the essential help of peer reviewers – an NHMRC honour roll

Peer review is essential in ensuring NHMRC continues to support the highest quality research and researchers in our universities, medical research institutes and in health care settings around Australia.

I would like to thank all members of the NHMRC Grant Review Panels and the many thousands of external assessors for their invaluable contribution to the peer review of all the applications across all our funding schemes.

An Honour Roll of all those who provided external assessments or participated in Grant Review Panels is now on our website.

Participating in peer review is an important aspect of a researcher’s work and career, and we encourage employing organisations to reinforce this in their internal considerations around employment and promotion.

RGMS

Performance
Since February this year, RGMS has provided fully reliable and stable access, including under peak loads during the close of rounds and during assessment processes.

To further improve performance, we have implemented additional enhancements to the capacity of RGMS. We are confident that these new enhancements will significantly boost the performance RGMS particularly as we head into the opening of the next rounds of grant applications in December.

Useability
In response to feedback from users, we are improving the useability of the system for applicants and assessors. These improvements include:

A simplified ‘RGMS landing page’ that will help users to more easily navigate directly to the tasks they want to perform.

E-mail acknowledgement to users to confirm key steps such as submitting an application, completing an assessment or a rebuttal.

User friendly templates to be used for uploading key documents, such as research plans and assessments.

Meanwhile, it is helpful to NHMRC if users keep their CV’s up to date, especially contact details.

Opening of next funding rounds

Each year, the key dates for all NHMRC funding schemes are published on our website.

Applications for Centres of Research Excellence will open later this month.

The Australian Research Council and NHMRC are working to sequence key dates for our funding rounds to avoid clashes of dates which place unreasonable pressure on researchers applying to grants from both the agencies.

Again, I sincerely thank all members of the research community for their contribution to peer review and Grant Review Panels.